Once A Pilgrim: a breathtaking, pulse-pounding SAS thriller. James Deegan
‘Sure, why don’t you come with me, Mr Casey?’
He lifted the tape, and Pat ducked under.
The two men walked to the wrecked Sierra.
‘I don’t know if you recognise this man?’ said the detective, when they reached the vehicle.
Sean Casey lay on the ground, his ruined head in a pool of blood and pulp, sightless eyes staring into the drizzle of the night.
‘Fuck me,’ said Pat Casey.
‘Can you positively identify this individual as your brother, Mr Casey?’
‘You know full well that’s Sean, you fucking cunt.’
‘Oh, dear,’ said the detective inspector, allowing a look of great sorrow to settle on his face. ‘May I say on behalf of the Royal Ulster Constabulary that I am terribly sorry for your loss, sir.’
‘Where’s Gerry?’
‘Ah, yes. We do have two more bodies. If you could help us with identification that would be grand.’
‘Show me, you bastard.’
The inspector shone his torch into the car. Ciaran O’Brien’s bloodstained corpse lay wedged between the front seats.
‘Now, is that your Gerard?’
Pat Casey looked at the police officer. ‘If you don’t stop fucking me around, I swear…’
‘Please calm down, Mr Casey,’ said the inspector, ‘or I shall have to have you arrested. We do have one further individual dead in that house there, but I’m afraid I can’t let you go in there because it’s a potential crime scene. If you’d like to hang around the body will be moved shortly, so you can see it then.’
‘You fucking…’ said Casey. ‘Someone’ll pay for this.’
The detective smirked. ‘It does look as though someone’s already paid for something tonight, Pat.’
Casey put his face close to the police officer’s. ‘What did you say?’ he growled.
The detective stared back at him, poker-faced. He was a veteran of nearly twenty years of this shit, and he was not easily intimidated. When he’d woken up that morning his life had been in danger, and when he went to sleep that night nothing would have changed. He’d lost several colleagues to the likes of Casey, and would quite cheerfully have pulled out his sidearm and shot him in the face there and then.
‘What did I say?’ he said. ‘What I said, Pat, was that Gerard died crying and begging for his life. Three-nil to the Parachute Regiment, I believe. I’m going to have a few drams the night toasting this lot into hell. Now, fuck off out my sight. And pass my condolences to your mother. When the old cow’s sober, mind.’
Pat tried to stare him down, but the policeman just winked at him.
‘You’re a dead man walking.’
‘We’re all dead, Pat, even you. It’s just the when bit that we don’t know.’ He chuckled. ‘Ask your brothers.’
‘You’re a dead man. Whoever did this is a dead man. As long as I live.’
‘You take care now, Pat, you hear?’ said the detective. ‘Your poor ma wouldn’t want to lose all her boys in one night, would she?’
Casey turned on his heel and walked away, passing within twenty feet of Mick Parry and John Carr, who were now part of the cordon securing the area.
Back in his car, he looked at Paulie the driver.
‘They’re all dead,’ he said. ‘Sean, Ciaran, Gerard. All of them head-jobbed. Fucking murdered by the SAS.’
‘Scum, Pat,’ said Paulie. ‘Scum. They don’t play by the rules. It’s that shoot-to-kill, that’s what it is fucking is. That bitch Thatcher. It’s her death squads.’
Pat Casey clenched his fists so hard that his nails nearly drew blood from his palms.
‘As God is my fucking witness,’ he said, ‘I swear I’ll find the fuckers that did this. If it takes me fifty years I will have their fucking lives.’
JOHN CARR WOKE up with a thick head, a pretty blonde he didn’t know, and a bad feeling about the day ahead.
The clock radio said it was just after 5am, and he knew it had been gone 2am when he’d finally got to sleep, thanks to the attentions of the girl snoring gently next to him.
He lay there for a moment, silently cursing. Perhaps the only thing he regretted about his time in the SAS was that it had ruined his sleep patterns. Years of raids carried out in the wee small hours will do that to you.
Still, he’d always been able to function on not much kip. Plenty of times he’d not slept for a couple of days straight: if you thought about it like that, three hours was luxury.
He turned on his bedside light and looked at the blonde.
Early twenties and very fit, but not quite so hot with her hair everywhere, her mouth slack and a line of crusted drool snaking its way down onto the pillow.
What was her name?
Emily?
Emma?
Elizabeth?
Something beginning with E, he was sure of that, but he was fucked if he could get any further than that.
He could just about remember her coming on to him at the bar over in Fulham.
About ten-ish, when he’d been about eight pints deep.
It had been Guy de Vere’s annual birthday bash – always a big night, and a good chance to catch up with one or two blokes he’d not seen for a while.
He hadn’t gone there looking for a woman – there were enough women in his life as it was, and they complicated things: he liked simplicity, and routine, and order.
But somehow they always seemed to find him.
He moved slightly, and she stirred.
‘Morning, John,’ she said, opening two enormous blue eyes and looking very directly at him. Her voice was clearest cut glass crystal, roughened slightly by the Marlboro Lights she’d been smoking all night. She gave a sleepy smile, and then looked at him reproachfully. ‘You really are a very naughty boy.’
‘Am I?’ he said.
‘Bringing me here, doing all those unspeakable things to me, when you hardly know me and you’re old enough to be my father.’ She yawned. ‘I’m not that sort of girl.’
‘I think you are. And I’m not old enough to be your father.’
‘You’re not far off.’ She rubbed her eyes and ran a forefinger over his chest and up onto his chin. ‘Who did this to you?’ she said, tracing the upside-down crescent of the scar below his mouth.
‘A guy,’ said Carr.
‘How?’
‘He threw a grenade into a room I was in.’
‘What terrible manners.’
‘It was a bit cheeky.’
‘What happened to him?’
Carr looked at her, sideways. ‘I happened to him,’ he said.
The